Shadow Brain is a little known game made by a little known company with a stupid or awesome name (dunno yet) called Pony Canyon. I stumbled upon this homie purely through searching the Famicom library for something obscure and possibly funky. There are not many games like it on the system that aren’t called Megami Tensei, and is a game that requires a similar pain threshold – it’s hard. It also seems complex but is also a bit shallow.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a NES game whose very existance is baffling. Why does this exist? Who thought, hmmm, let’s make a game based on this old story – but not even follow the book at all? And then who decided to make it one of the most brutal games in history?
This title has some infamy thanks to the Angry Video Game Nerd who extensively raged on it, and honestly that does paint a decent picture of the game and its frustrations. But I am going to go through my personal experience, and how I have seen hell, and am a different man for it. This will probably turn super ranty, but it needs to come out while the horror is still fresh in my mind.
I know now, after completing Bats and Terry, that it is based off a manga of the same name. However, that didn’t help it make anymore sense. Instead it’s everybody’s favorite Purgatory Loop: Bats and Terry vs the Dragons of their Inner Hell.
Also known as Vaccine in the west, this is something I’ve had my eye on for a while. In a sea of games replicating NES, SNES, etc., it was nice to see a game inspired by old PS1 games – and one of the grandest genres to come out of the PS1: the survival horror.
Luckily Dead House wears its love on its sleeve, and adds an interesting element that I would like to see utilized again. Dead House has good things going for it that make it a recommendable title if ya got the cheese to spare.
See it HERE. Finally got around to doing this. Like aaalways, it will forever be a work in progress. Hopefully it’s sufficiently different from the main release, I haven’t checked that script yet.
I tried to give lots of the bosses certain speaking patterns, like Grizzly speaks deliberately and fully because I see him, despite his appearance, as an honourable almost samurai-esque dude.
X is job focused and overall polite.
Zero is straight forward and has a bit of a mouth.
Dinorex is a brute who can be strangely poetic.
Rosered is a petty punk.
Dynamo is a goofball and talks like one.
Etc.
Hopefully it’s decent!
I mean the title in the nicest way possible, I swear!
I bought the Mercenaries Saga Chronicles collection off the Switch eShop which includes all three titles in this series I had never heard of prior. Scouring the internet, there were results for 2 and 3 but seemingly nothing for 1 outside of Japanese sites. Seems like 1 gets the least love, so I’ma give it some time today.
R?MJ : The Mystery Hospital is one of the many games to come out of Japan – or rather, stay in Japan – during the rise of the PS1 and 3D graphics that tried to be a “cinematic experience”, blurring the lines between movies and games. While games these days still try to do that for some reason, it was rampant in the PS1 area with lots of hallway walking simulators with ridiculously bad CGI cutscenes and minimalist gameplay (Vampire Detective, Maria, many glorified visual novels, etc, are some derp examples). What resulted were a bunch of games nobody remembers, despite their efforts to be amazing. In reality, I think these were popular because they were easy and cheap to make – no real gameplay engine necessary! Get your brother-in-law Ricky to do the cutscenes, he likes computers right?
R?MJ (what a catchy acronym, but pronounced just “MJ”) is one of the kings of derp in this genre. There may be “worse” games technically speaking, but this one is so absolutely silly and stupid it has become one of my most beloved of the “kusoge” niche. It has been some time since I played it, but hopefully the memories burned into my psyche will help guide me along.
